TV content distribution network (CDN) specialist Edgeware has announced a suite of new features that the company says will enable broadcasters and content owners to deliver live large-scale OTT services in a higher quality than conventional broadcast TV.
The technology has been developed for operators that have invested in the rights to popular sporting events and reality shows that attract large audiences all watching simultaneously.
The suite includes Edgeware’s Dynamic Asset Spreading, which is designed to enable operators to spread popular content across a wider range of servers than would be populated usually. The more popular the content, the wider it’s spread, increasing streaming capacity for big events while reducing the risk of overloading servers.
Also new is Predictive Session Load Balancing, which the company says dynamically reacts to a build-up in the queue of requests, monitoring them against pre-set limits. It controls the on-boarding of huge numbers of viewers and directs new client requests to the next available server to avoid congestion before it can occur.
Edge Asset Request Consolidation is intended to avoid streaming servers sending out multiple identical requests for the same content if there is a cache-miss, which can occur with live content in latency-minimised CDNs because new segments of content may not have been written to the origin server before the client requests them. The company says that this feature consolidates thousands of identical requests for new segments into one, before sending it to the origin, alleviating pressure on the origin server and saving back-haul capacity.
Alongside the new features, Edgeware is also offering its customers an Online Monitoring Service which includes a system health check before major events, and additional reporting.
All of the new features are available now, both as part of Edgeware’s software portfolio and on its purpose-built TV servers, and are already being deployed in live networks.
